Exclusive: Watch Nick Waterhouse's 'This Is a Game'

"God knows why everyone who meets me wants to put me in a suit and a late-night bar drinking whiskey!"

Things could be worse for Nick Waterhouse, to be sure. Waterhouse — the swinging soul singer currently soundtracking the life of young Los Angeles — tends to see a few shots poured once he's on set in some seedy bar for a music video shoot. With "This Is a Game," Waterhouse is sitting pretty in his element down to the vintage look and speakeasy feel that perfectly match his pipes. "This is my third video in a row where they bring me a three-finger shot at some point."

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"This Is a Game" is one of ten new songs that paint this picture on Holly, which drops via Innovative Leisure on March 4. Having tapped garage god Ty Segall and jazz and blues dynamo Mose Allison for his latest release, Waterhouse straddles the line between rock grit and smooth, sultry R&B while tapping into the talents of his collaborators and their West Coast setting. Los Angeles is more than Waterhouse's home, it's his most formidable muse, and his take on the haunts and darkened corners that have created his LA make for the kind of listen you want to grab some popcorn for. It's sexy, it's smart, and it's definitely worth another round in a bar east of Koreatown in the middle of a dark and stormy night.

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ESQUIRE.COM: So, Holly is an ode to your Los Angeles, huh?

NICK WATERHOUSE: Sure. I kind of grew up in the shadow of Los Angeles, very aware of it. When I was in college, I took a bunch of history of the city courses. I wound up moving here because I learned so much about the place. Just being here was kind of a big influence on how this record feels.

ESQ: I like that your educational background makes you an official scholar regarding all things LA.

NW: I don't tend to do things by half-measures. [Laughs]

ESQ: What are some of the sights and sounds that make up your Los Angeles? Are the songs directly inspired by actual places, or is it more of a vibe thing?

NW: LA is like any city. You visit and you have a superficial concept of these scenes, or little drives through neighborhoods, and then the more time you spend there, you get to delve deeper into the little ecosystems. The first place I moved, I was renting a room above a house in Echo Park. Highland Park, Eagle Rock, all that seems to have grown out of what Silver Lake was over the last decade or fifteen years. There are a lot of recurring characters and places that I think are very unique to this round of culture here. I ended up moving downtown, which is its own thing. It's so close to the east side. It's not unusual to wind up in a couple of different circuits and around a couple of different personalities, too. Being a musician now, I have a pass to things that I probably wouldn't have been able to be around before. I think people mistake me for maybe being cool. I get invited to things.

ESQ: Hey, LA banks on coolness and exclusivity. Did you draw from ideas of Old Hollywood?

NW: Oh, sure. When I sing about Sunset Boulevard, it's a heightened allegorical version, but it's rooted in so many details that are real. I'm also very interested in a lot of the arts that were here that may have been neglected on a national scale. Underrespected authors, whether it's Chester Himes or Nathanael West. Reading TheDay of the Locust, when I was growing up here, it was a secret, you know? It was like finding a very obscure record, almost. Now, I see more and more people become aware of them, which I really love. It's not about living in the past. It's seeing the thread of the unreality and the very unique environment that this past truly is.

ESQ: Holly is also unique in that you've managed to make a soulful record that doesn't delve into personal territory. There aren't a lot of ballads here where you're wondering who they're about, or where your old homes used to be, things like that.

NW: It's funny — someone was commenting the other day, "You're a real throwback guy! They're not making concept records anymore!" I'm not admitting that I made a concept record or anything here... I really felt something was occurring when I was working on the record where I began to see a large picture. It's not for nothing that when I was doing the dedication for Holly I chose somebody like Robert Towne to talk to. I feel like sometimes that might be a more effective way to communicate what I'm actually feeling, like good fiction does. Characters become stand-ins for yourself, and then you feel freer to talk about things that you wouldn't if you were doing a confessional piece of work. I've never really been that type of guy.

ESQ: I didn't realize you dedicated Holly to Towne. Could you elaborate on your decision to do that?

NW: Robert Towne was a screenwriter who famously was the script doctor for The Godfather. His big life work was Chinatown. He wrote Chinatown. And Shampoo, which is another favorite of mine. What you were saying about LA being an industry town, I love his role in the industry where he was sort of on the periphery, but he was contributing. To me, he was someone who worked very well within his medium and effectively communicated both a very personal, fantastic sense of story and atmosphere and character. I saw Chinatown when I was 17 by myself, and I still remember the drive there: I was driving down the Pacific Coast Highway to this old theater that I would go to every Thursday after school. I had no idea what I was getting into and that blew my mind as much as any record I've ever heard. That's always haunted me. I'm not going to imitate him, but the same atmosphere that I felt that day is what I feel like is coming forth in Holly for me.

ESQ: You can tell cinema's been a huge influence for you from the videos alone. Not to say your music is old school, but you incorporate a lot of classic, celebrated sounds without making vintage music.

NW: The tune is about being around young LA. There's such a hazy division between business and personal... It's always like things are casual but high stakes. You're never really sure if you're in a business exchange or a personal one. I'm singing to myself, I guess, but it's about a character, and it's about exchanges. People who are saying, "It's gotta be this way — I wish it wasn't, but it is!" and in the meantime they're making a buck off of you or getting something good. Somebody told me that it's an overly cynical tune. I don't think it's that cynical. I just think this is the way things feel sometimes. That's in a lot of art that I like. You're trying to look around a corner and you can't quite see. You can't get upset when you don't get what you think you deserve.